Oolite Bulletins

Thanks to Griff THE ShaderGuru the Aurora is in game and shining bright. Wow it dwarfs the station. Now I must write special AI for it as it is a danger in the safety zone while turning Also the bounding (crash box is a bit to big. So tweaks have to be made but here it is.

*jaw drops*

Simply stunning. Counting the seconds 'till I can download this baby.

She's a beauty! (but is she unsinkable?)

pagroove wrote:

Then edit the plist for that. But shouldn't a ship with a length of 1.2. km not be strong?

It should be strong, but not untouchable. With the recharge rate of 40 you must use a continuous stream of 4 military lasers to beat it. Doable but difficult against a moving object. I would double the ships energy but cut the recharge rate in half.

thargoid wrote:

Or perhaps just to see it use the js console to drop the ship's energy (player.ship.target.energy = 100 or somesuch after targetting it) and then just shoot it once. The script triggers on energy low.

Or call that function direct by typeing: player.ship.target.script.shipEnergyIsLow()

pagroove wrote:

1. How about special BigshipTorpedo's that first cut through the hull and then explode from the inside. So that we can destroy everything in the Ooniverse. (including stations)

Here you asked for it yourself: set of 3 torpedos with thank to Cmdr Wyvern. I used his nuke.oxp and added 2 extra torpedos. Long time ago I already replaced on one torpedo the warhead with a quirium mine. On your request I now added extra explosive charges to this torpedo.
This was more difficult than I initially thought. One restriction was that it still should fit in the standard ship launch tube. I only managed by drastically reduce the amount of propelling fuel. To get an acceptable action radius after all, I also replaced the engine with a much more fuel economic one at the cost of much of its speed. For large ships this will still be fast enough.

I called it the "penetrating torpedo". Normal missiles are useless against big ships. For some reason normal missiles do no damage on large ships. This torpedo however, does first penetrate the hull with a small explosion and only than releases its main payload within the target ship. 3 of the missiles are enough to kill a dredger.

(With your Orisis I have a problem. When trying to kill it Oolite crashes. Not only with the missiles but also with laserfire. Would be interesting to hear if others experience the same).

The Osiris seems to have too big a collision box.

It's a good looking ship. Nice to have it on the spaceways, but is it a good idea to have it appear in low tech, low government systems like a TL 3 Dictatorship?

Nemoricus wrote:

The Osiris seems to have too big a collision box.

I think it is because it is centred wrong. It looks like the zero coordinate is defined at the back not the middle of the ship.

.., but is it a good idea to have it appear in low tech, low government systems like a TL 3 Dictatorship?

As it is now, it uses the bigTrader populator. That one adds ships on basis of the productivity of a system alone. (With a randomise factor) Systems with higher productivity need more transportation capacity so it makes sense to mainly add big ships there. And when growing cheap grain at mass you can have a big productivity despite of a low government type.

How do I recenter it?

Eric Walch wrote:

pagroove wrote:

Then edit the plist for that. But shouldn't a ship with a length of 1.2. km not be strong?

It should be strong, but not untouchable. With the recharge rate of 40 you must use a continuous stream of 4 military lasers to beat it. Doable but difficult against a moving object. I would double the ships energy but cut the recharge rate in half.

thargoid wrote:

Or perhaps just to see it use the js console to drop the ship's energy (player.ship.target.energy = 100 or somesuch after targetting it) and then just shoot it once. The script triggers on energy low.

Or call that function direct by typeing: player.ship.target.script.shipEnergyIsLow()

pagroove wrote:

1. How about special BigshipTorpedo's that first cut through the hull and then explode from the inside. So that we can destroy everything in the Ooniverse. (including stations)

Here you asked for it yourself: set of 3 torpedos with thank to Cmdr Wyvern. I used his nuke.oxp and added 2 extra torpedos. Long time ago I already replaced on one torpedo the warhead with a quirium mine. On your request I now added extra explosive charges to this torpedo.
This was more difficult than I initially thought. One restriction was that it still should fit in the standard ship launch tube. I only managed by drastically reduce the amount of propelling fuel. To get an acceptable action radius after all, I also replaced the engine with a much more fuel economic one at the cost of much of its speed. For large ships this will still be fast enough.

I called it the "penetrating torpedo". Normal missiles are useless against big ships. For some reason normal missiles do no damage on large ships. This torpedo however, does first penetrate the hull with a small explosion and only than releases its main payload within the target ship. 3 of the missiles are enough to kill a dredger.

(With your Orisis I have a problem. When trying to kill it Oolite crashes. Not only with the missiles but also with laserfire. Would be interesting to hear if others experience the same).

Are you using the big texture? I would advice to switch to the light version then.

I think it's the memory flowing over that is causing the problem. I had that to. ATM we cannot make HD textures for ships. I had also a few times a crash because the cpu was at 100%.

I then resized the texture. 2048 by 2048 is now acceptable for my computer. However I can assume that this is even too big for others. So therefore I reduced the large texture even further. to 1024 by 1024.

Maybe even further downsizing will prevent crashing.

Nemoricus wrote:

The Osiris seems to have too big a collision box.

I believe that this is a general problem, especially with the trunk build.

The Caduceus, for example, should fit into many stations and objects, but does cause an instant explosion instead. Seems to have to do with turret subentities in that case. However, when I was at a safe (but close) distance to other big objects, I often was destroyed when I did turn although the views told me that the ship had pretty much space around it...

Screet

Really ? I thought I fixed that with the neo ship?

OK it still won't do fuel stations. But show me a turreted ship that will.

ClymAngus wrote:

Really ? I thought I fixed that with the neo ship?

OK it still won't do fuel stations. But show me a turreted ship that will.

Yeah...subentitiy problems. I even did take some time to look at the specific code but could not see any obvious problem. Guess I'll need to look further, especially since I've got the impression that my other code tweak idea really is too complex at the moment and except a strange instant-close of Oolite it's the only real problem I do see with the trunk version compared to 1.72.2 - and the trunk build already has a reals showstopper of 1.72.2 removed, thus I consider it more stable (talking about the escorts with escorts loop).

My main idea to look for is that the boxes for subentities are not checked at their respective position, but somehow added outside the bounding box of the ship, even if the ship itself would cover the subentities. However, I'm not really sure if that is what's happening.

Screet

Screet wrote:

Yeah...subentitiy problems. I even did take some time to look at the specific code but could not see any obvious problem. Guess I'll need to look further, especially since I've got the impression that my other code tweak idea really is too complex at the moment ....

I also have no clue, but all ships are assigned a collision radius on initialisation. By this the ships are interpreted as spheres. The real collision detection starts when you enter the sphere. When you turn the show-bounding-boxes ON, you see a box drawn around all ships. When you approach the face of the main box, you touch the invisible collision radius before you hit the box.
I had often crashes in the past when I let a NPC ship fly parallel, outside of the box. The crashes always happened near the middle of the box face when collision detection started.

The problem is mainly with big objects because Oolite physics dictate that collision damage is proportional with the other ships mass. And the Orisis has such a big mass that even a slight collision is deadly.

pagroove wrote:

How do I recenter it?

In Wings just select the whole ship. Than in the menu: Tools --> Center --> All.
I did it on my computer with your ship and now its turning axes is the middle of the ship and I can approach it from the back without crashing in an invisible wall.

can you mail the files back to me then I release a patch and credit you for it.
?
Thanks for mentioning it.

EDIT
I believe the Aurora has the same problems. I will try your solution on that ship before releasing.